Mike Tyson on Broadway

After watching Mike Tyson’s one-man show on Broadway, it all seems so obvious: his life has always been a one-man show. Unlike those fighters whose legacies were carved out in collaboration with rivals—Louis vs. Schmeling, Liston vs. Patterson, Ali vs. Frazier—Tyson never had a true antagonist. His opponents always seemed beside the point. It is precisely his arena-sized isolation, his painfully live, often apocalyptic solo performances that have made him a person of fascination for two and half decades. In person, it’s mostly his lisping wit, the unpredictable turns of his Woody Allen meets Genghis Khan shtick, that continue to surprise. Like every serious analysand, Tyson entices us by hovering constantly on the verge of a “breakthrough.” Who else goes live on the “Today” show and affably speculates, in the spirit of breakfast chatter, that his veganism can be traced to a former compulsion to frequent prostitutes? Sonny Liston was a man who wanted to be left alone. Mike Tyson wants to be left alone on stage.

“Mike Tyson: The Undisputed Truth” was directed by Spike Lee, written by Tyson’s wife, Kiki, and attended by Kanye West, 50 Cent, and Bryant Gumbel. Although structured as an intimate slide show, the performance feels more like a slavishly chronological series of boozy barroom reminiscences, complete with the high-spiritedness, the cringe-inducing settling of scores, the wallowing, the feints of solemnity, and occasional blubbering incoherence built into that form. Some of this jaggedness is to be expected—what would be more dishonest and insufferable than a slick Broadway version of Tyson?

But this doesn’t excuse some of the show’s godawful narrative decisions. Who thought that it would be a good idea to send Tyson off on a pitifully long rant about his ex-wife Robin Givens? Somewhere in the third act of this ugly little play-within-a-play, when Tyson began making sophomoric cracks at a photo of Givens’s mother, I considered standing up and booing. The only thing that prevented me from doing that was the menacingly partisan audience, almost wall-to-wall wise guys and wannabes, who clapped with Stalinist discipline at each cheap applause line. But if these people were truly fans, they would have demanded to hear something substantive about Tyson’s experience as a boxer. At least Harry Houdini, who spent his later years speaking out against magic, had enough regard for his art to debunk it. The premise of “Undisputed” seems to be that boxing isn’t a worthy subject for storytelling, that Tyson’s career in the ring is nothing more than the backstory for a canned celebrity redemption tale.

There’s no reason for narrative filler when Tyson is one of the few boxing champions whose mind is alive to the problems of fighting as a spectacle. This is the man who once told a bunch of reporters before a fight, “I know at times I come across like a Neanderthal or a babbling idiot, but I like that person. I like to show you that person because that’s who you all come to see. I’m Tyson. I’m a tyrannical titan. And sometimes I say, ‘God, it would be good to be a fake somebody rather than a real nobody.’ ” Nothing in “Undisputed” pops quite like that, nor like the moment in James Toback’s 2008 documentary, in which Tyson provided a startling narration of his experience entering the arena on fight night, engulfed by an ecstatic, screaming, blood-thirsty mass of people, his Dionysian journey from annihilating terror to omnipotence, when he seemed to die—torn to pieces by the frenzied mob—before being reborn in the ring, under the lights. Under these Broadway lights, however, Tyson might as well be reciting from his Wikipedia page when he informs us that he became the youngest champ in history, then pauses for a respectful ovation. Boo!

But Tyson is incapable of dullness. And he cannot help but puncture some of the show’s deadeningly pious moments. To wit: the story in which Tyson had his mother’s body exhumed and reburied in a deluxe casket. The script brings this remarkable detail to our attention for the sole purpose, it seems, of prompting solemn applause (part of the relentless P.R. effort to rehab his image as a good guy). But even as the audience duly complied, Tyson—during the performance I attended—quietly complicated the moment. “Cause, you know,” he added, “I’m insecure about that.” Tyson knows that the upshot of that story isn’t that he did the right thing but rather that he went overboard in doing it, and that he still endlessly seeks validation for it. He knows that buying a fancy coffin for his tragic mother, an addict who died on the street when he was child, is a poignant expression of unresolved regret and guilt, even if the show has him simplemindedly congratulating himself for it.

The most telling moments come in Tyson’s frequent side comments. He had opened the night by saying, “This is my story, in my own words, so to speak.” That off-handed and probably improvised “so to speak” might as well be the title of the show. Tyson, as usual, is in someone else’s hands. Sometimes this tension is itself illuminating. The theatre is garnished with handmade banners celebrating Brooklynness (“Spreadin’ Love, It’s Da Brooklyn Way” reads one). These sentiments create an odd contrast to Tyson’s own dark take on his old neighborhood. In Tyson’s stories, “Brownsville” is used as a shorthand for his tortured macho posturing, his bottomless feeling of deprivation, his will to self-destruction, his loneliness—there isn’t anything about community there, nor is there much nostalgia. His Brooklyn is a place, a state of mind, from which he has struggled all of his life to break free. These touches of Brooklyn pride suggest the hand of the borough’s original hipster, Spike Lee.

And yet, in the show itself, Lee’s touch is light. When Tyson refers to himself as a “kind of a white black guy,” you expect and hope that Lee will have Tyson dig a bit. No dice. But even if Tyson sometimes expands on the wrong stories, or when the right stories fail to unfold fully, he always has a knack for turning a detail. On watching other boys return from the gym at the juvenile detention center where he first encountered boxing: “They had cracked ribs and broken noses,” he recalls. “But they were happy. I wanted that.” About his complicated guardian and trainer, Cus D’Amato: “I was intimidated by everything he said. When he said, ‘don’t be intimidated,’ that was intimidating.” This is Tyson at his best. In deft strokes, he punctuates even some of his most notorious moments. We see a recent photo of him posing next to Evander Holyfield, the fighter from whose ear Tyson gnawed a sizeable chunk during a fight in 1997. We are told that they’ve since reconciled. “Just look at him,” says Tyson, shaking his head. “He’s this tall, handsome, distinguished man. And look at me: looking like some fat old grandmother.” It is a devastatingly funny and accurate description of the photo—and a case-study in Tyson psychology: when you are out-classed and desperate, bite someone else’s head. Later, when you’re consumed with self-hate, bite your own.

For Tyson fans, much of the show’s material is shopworn. We’ll continue to pretend not to hear that his original plan was to have his face tattooed with hearts. Tyson does drop a few worthy, lesser-known details, useful footnotes for his biographers. Promoter-thief Don King apparently used to charge Tyson eight thousand bucks a week for towels. (Tyson does a fine impression of King as a kind of chipmunk on coke.) We learn the background of a photo of Tyson at age ten. It turns out that he’d stolen a jacket, then proceeded immediately to a photo booth at Woolworth’s to have his picture taken with it. This disclosure revises the mood of that familiar image, one of the few childhood photos of Tyson. The genuine boyish delight that has always made that picture so sad, given Tyson’s cruel upbringing, is now brought under an even deeper shadow of pathos. A bit later, in one of the show’s more melancholic and precise formulations, Tyson remarks, “We didn’t have anything, so we always wanted to look good.” In that sly substitution, of “so” instead of “but,” Tyson’s invites his old Brownsville fatalism onto the stage. Once there, it hangs like an unspoken caption under the remainder of the program’s photos: this is what I do when I don’t have anything, it says, I put on a show.